[4] Geha grew up wanting to be an astronaut after seeing the launch of the first Space Shuttle, and shifted her interests to astronomy in high school as a more realistic career path.
[5] She majored in applied and engineering physics as an undergraduate at Cornell University, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1995.
[4] Her dissertation, Internal dynamics, structure and formation of dwarf elliptical galaxies, was jointly supervised by Puragra (Raja) GuhaThakurta and Roeland van der Marel.
[4] In 2017, she was given a Howard Hughes Medical Institute professorship, funding a five-year program for science education of military veterans.
[10] She is described by students as being "the perfect Professor" and received the Dylan Hixon Prize for teaching from Yale University.